Mac mini (Late 2014) 1.4 GHz review: Mac mini is sort of upgradable, but is it any good as it is?

Apple has finally has given the cheap iMac (last updated in October 2012) some love.

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Rating

Price

Pros

Lowest ever start price

Supreme build quality

Quiet

Two Thunderbolt 2

Extremely economical

Cons

Memory now soldered and not upgradeable

Loss of FireWire port

Mac mini (Late 2014) 1.4 GHz review

It’s been way too long. Not our words but Apple’s, printed on the invitations to a product launch event in October this year. Unveiled then were an iPad Air 2, iMac with Retina 5K display... and a revamped Mac mini.

Of all those products it was arguably the Mac mini that was most in need of the attention, since it hadn’t been looked at by the running-upgrades department in two long years. Also read our Mac mini (Late 2014) 2.8GHz review.

But we say ‘arguably’ advisedly. The 2012 Mac mini may have looked a little over-ripe in computer years but it also didn’t need much to improve it. Its Ivy Bridge-generation Intel Core processor was still an efficient chip that helped secure the Mac mini as one of the most power-sipping PCs on the planet.

It came with 4 GB of memory which could be upgraded up to 16 GB in seconds through a spin-off hatch on the underside. For storage it had plenty, either a 500 or 1000 GB hard disk; or optionally could be configured with a 1 TB Fusion Drive or 256 GB Flash Drive.

The new Mac mini (Late 2014) is built around exactly the same cool and understated ingot of aluminium, milled from solid into a perfect round-cornered square of 21st century computing.

Grabbing attention in this revision is the price drop of the entry-level model, from 2012’s £499 to a new low of £399. There are down sides though. The Mac mini’s performance peak has been eroded by striking any quad-core processors from the list; and system memory follows Apple’s new trend of being soldered to the logic board and cannot therefore ever be upgraded at a later date. Check out the Mac mini on Apple's web store: here.

Mac mini (Late 2014): build different

The Mac mini (Late 2014) has two rather than one Thunderbolt ports, these now up to version 2 specification. But in the process it has lost its FireWire 800 connector. If you need FireWire there is an adaptor available (£25) although we note from Apple Store customer feedback that this has its own issues with some peripherals that otherwise work fine with a native FireWire port.

The Wi-Fi card inside has been upgraded to 802.11ac, and with the help of the mini’s three-antennae configuration is capable of wireless sync speeds up to 1300 Mb/s (with real data throughput typically up to around half this speed).

Mac mini (Late 2014): storage wars

For storage, the Mac mini still comes in 500 and 1000 GB hard-disk configurations, with the same additional Fusion Drive and SSD-only options, the latter now up to 1 TB Flash Drive for just the top 2.8 GHz processor model.

Since the optical drive was stripped from the Unibody chassis with the mid-2011 refresh, the Mac mini has had space for two 2.5in SATA drives inside. That’s still the case, although there’s only one SATA connector on the logic board now, since the Fusion or Flash Drive models now work with PCIe-attached solid-state drives.

That’s great news for performance. Apple’s PCIe-attached flash drives are close to twice as fast as those available to Windows PCs, which still uniformly rely on the SATA Revision 3 bus protocol. However even now, more than a year after Apple’s PCIe-attachment technology was introduced with 2013’s MacBook Air, there is still no third-party manufacturer able to make a drop-in replacement to upgrade capacity. So DIYers looking to make a dual-drive Mac mini out of a single-drive purchase will be out of luck.

When it comes to on-board data storage, the 500 GB SATA disk should be more than adequate in capacity for many people, if conspicuously short of élan when it comes to system responsiveness compared to, say, the MacBook Air.

Mac mini (Late 2014): getting inside and updating the disk drive

You can still upgrade the disk drive yourself, or find a competent technician to do the job – once you get past Apple’s tamperproof screws on the underside.

The black plastic ‘lid’ still comes off easily enough, but behind that, instead of the inviting innards of yore, there’s now an edge-to-edge circular steel bulkhead in place, sealed down with Torx T6T security screws. Get passed these and you’ll be able to swap the internal disk for something much faster, such as a SATA Revision 3 SSD from the likes of Kingston, Crucial or Samsung.

Soldered memory is perhaps the cause of most anguish among users with recent Mac models, since it means you’re expected to anticipate the amount of memory you’ll need for the lifetime of the product at the time of purchase; and moreover because you have to pay Apple’s inflated prices for SDRAM.

Take the entry-level £399 Mac mini we tested here as an example. This is built with 4 GB of memory, and to double that to 8 GB will cost you £80 from Apple.

For the previous generation, an 8 GB upgrade kit is available from Crucial, currently selling for £61. So the going third-party route saves you just £19 here.

The difference becomes more troubling at the next size jump. To make a 16 GB Mac mini, Apple charges £240 on top of the standard 4 GB model’s price. Turning to the Crucial UK website, it currently charges £123.59 for its 2 x 8 GB memory kit of DDR3 PC3-12800 RAM. And this is where Apple gets the bad press, for its near-100 percent markup on other retailers’ prices.

If you elect for the middle Mac mini model (2.6 GHz, £599) or top (2.8 GHz, £799), you’ll already find 8 GB memory soldered in place. To configure either of these with 16 GB costs an extra £160 at time of purchase.

For the previous generation, to upgrade to 16 GB still costs £123.59 even if you had 8 GB already installed with the typical 2 x 4 GB arrangement), so the Apple markup over the independent memory-seller alternatives is reduced to only around £36 here.

Mac mini (Late 2014): lab results

There’s now a very wide range of processor clock speeds offered for the Mac mini, from the cheapest model’s 1.4 GHz Core i5 to a CTO model with 3.0 GHz Core i7.

We tested just the cheapest model here with its MacBook Air-style 1.4 GHz dual-core processor. We don’t have performance results for the entry model of 2012 with its dual-core 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics. But we did find that the new Mac mini’s processor and graphics performance was unsurprisingly close to that of the current MacBook Air range, which takes the same Intel chipset.

In fact the entry-level 2014 Mac mini has much more in common with the entry-level 2014 iMac, since they share the same Intel chip and slow 2.5in notebook hard disk.

The Geekbench 3 processor/memory test rated this Mac mini with 2803 and 5401 points, for single- and multi-core speed respectively.

When we tested the 21.5-inch iMac earlier this year, it scored 2838 and 5464 points respectively. The circa-1 percent difference in results is insignificant and as easily explained by the wholly new OS X revision of 10.10 on the Mac mini against 10.9 on the iMac.

For comparison, the ‘middle’ model Mac mini of 2012 had a 2.3 GHz quad-core i5 processor, and scored 2966 points in single-core tests (a little bit faster, just under 6 percent for the statisticians). And in multi-core mode it scored 11752 points, which can be written as 218 percent faster.

How much the top-spec Mac mini of 2014 may trail the top-spec Mac mini of 2012 remains to be seen.

In the Cinebench tests we also saw the same kind of performance figures as the iMac (Mid-2014, 21.5-inch). Version 11.5 of the CPU test ranked the Mac mini with 1.1 and 2.49 points (versus 1.13 and 2.58 for the iMac). Version 15 scored the Mac mini with 97 and 236 points (98 and 240 points iMac).

Mac mini (Late 2014): graphics & gaming

Graphics tests also showed the same kind of performance as the entry-level iMac, with both machines relying solely on Intel HD Graphics 5000 within the Core i5 processor. Cinebench played at 22 and 23.1 fps for versions 11.5 and 15 of Cinebench, with the latter result around 1.5 fps faster than the iMac – which again could be explained by revisions in the core OS.

Gaming, we found, is not really viable for the Mac mini unless you play older games and/or turn down video quality to very low settings.

Feral’s Batman: Arkham City could average 31 fps when set to 1280 x 720 pixels and Medium quality, albeit with minima at 15 fps which would be noticeable as stutters in gameplay.

Tomb Raider 2013 uses the latest OpenGL 4.1 API which seems to require much more horsepower to run smoothly, in this game at least. At 1280 x 720 screen resolution and Low detail settings, the Mac mini mustered just 19.4 fps. Stepping up to Normal quality lowered framerate further to 15.8 fps.

We switched the game to Legacy OpenGL mode, where it then returned framerates of 34.5 and 24.4 fps for otherwise exactly the same configuration. With no obvious difference in rendering quality to our eyes, this tweak makes the game a more viable option on this Mac.

Power consumption figures have been reduced, as you may expect from not just a slower processor clock, but a change from Ivy Bridge to Haswell generation silicon. This change introduced Intel’s later FinFET ‘3D’ transistors, along with numerous other power-efficiency adjustments to improve battery economy in the laptop and mobile computing age.

The last time we measured a Mac mini it was drawing just 10 W of power from the mains when at the idle desktop. Today’s most affordable Mac mini was found to have just 5 W requirements, rising to a maximum of 40 W when running flat out. That figure of 5 W is startlingly low, another important tick in the mini’s pros list.

Verdict

The entry-level Mac mini at £399 is effectively the most affordable Macintosh ever sold in the computer line’s 30-year history. Yes, the PowerPC G4 version of 2005 started at just £329 in this country, but adjusted for inflation that’s closer to £429 in today’s money. What you get today is a decently fast mini desktop PC using an older hard disk for storage but which is in every other way right up to date; bleeding edge in fact when you consider just how far ahead of the vast majority of Windows wannabees are its wireless and Thunderbolt credentials. For the cheapest model especially where a buyer is looking to keep initial cost down, our only complaint is the lifetime memory sentence. This means a bump to 8 GB for £80 on pay day is almost mandatory, if you want to future-proof the little marvel for several years to come. Storage, for today at least, can still be upgraded with care.

Karen Haslam's preview of the 2014 Mac Mini follows on the next page...

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Comments

Carsten said: Comments,Carsten,@Cesar - will the entry level Mac Mini be sufficient for this purpose - as a home media server with plex server installed and connected to TV through HDMI? Is RAM/CPU important for that purpose?

Ryan said: Comments,Ryan,I can't speak to your WoW question, but I support several Macs in our work environment. 10.10 Yosemite will eat up your system resources (in order to function properly and look pretty). 4 GB of RAM is no longer enough for anything more intensive that word processing and casual web browsing.

Sparkk TV said: Comments,Sparkk TV,I have the new $499 base model with 4GB Ram &amp; 1.4ghz processor. I find the model is very good and fast. I do alot of photoshopping and video editing and find that the low Ram and low processor is alot faster than the reviews are saying. I am able to do everything with this model no problem. I ran into the rainbow spinner one time and that was Finder not responding and just relaunched it, no other problems however. I was even able to get the model on sale for $50 cheaper as I had Best Buy match an online price. I feel this little Mac Mini can do alot more than what is advertised. It's very powerful with the specs it comes with, which is the same as the Macbook Air.

appliance5000 said: Comments,appliance5000,Not sure on that last paragraph. With a PCI-e ssd you're not limited to sata speeds - it's a massive increase in speed, and with T-bolt 2 any external drive you hook up will be as fast as an internal drive. That's where you put your 1tb drive at the price you like.I did some tests on this; using an external ssd on usb 3(roughly the same speed as sata) and the internal ssd on my late 2013 air:duplicate a 4.7gb file: external 1 minute plus - internal 5 secondsbatch process 4.7 gb folder photoshop 16 to 8 bit mode change: external 40 sec - internal 30 seconds .save a 1.75 gb photoshop file: external: 17 sec, internal 10 seconds.admittedly this is amateur hour for testing but it gives you sense of the massive speed boost of pcie ssds. Coupled with the iris graphics it will be interesting to see how this shakes out. It's not an open and shut case.The way apple sealed off this machine is frustrating and so so apple-ish but I'll be interested in seeing benchmarks on it.

Cesar Deschamps said: Comments,Cesar Deschamps,Alright, as a user of the Mac Mini from the beginning, I think I can voice an opinion for real world usage as a general purpose device. By this I mean as a media center for movies, high res music, downloading, streaming and other internet stuff.So, I ordered my new Mac Mini the day it was released and I set it up as soon as it arrived. The first thing I noticed is blazing fast boot times. 10 seconds to usability on the desktop. of course, this is because I opted for the fusion drive and I am glad I did. Next I noticed, quick launches and smooth playback of my Blu-ray images and mkv files. SO as a performer, this does the trick.In all the years I owned the many mini's I have never upgraded hard drives and I have kept the memory I purchased from the beginning. To tell the truth, I believe you should invest in memory as recommended by reviewers. I do however add external hard drives and I now boast 6 terabytes attached to this mini.SO, looking at the way I use the mini, there is really no reason to have all the upgrade features. If you require a machine that is easily upgradable, this is not it. If you require a dead quiet media center mac with very low profile, then you will love the new mac mini.

FourString said: Comments,FourString,I think they were more worried about Mac Pro sales rather than those of the iMac

Arjay Cee said: Comments,Arjay Cee,Deeply disappointing after waiting for Apple to improve on the 2012 specs. This is a downgrade, in more than one criteria, with serious implications for repair and longevity. What happens after your 3-year Apple Care period is up?The answer Apple prefers: you toss it out and buy a new one.Then, as iFixit has now shown, there are the hoops to jump through if you want to replace a failed hard drive. You have to take out almost everything, including the motherboard, to get at it. Unbelievable. It's like it was designed with contempt for the user in mind.

JohnWhi said: Comments,JohnWhi,Inability to upgrade memory is a killer as far as I am concerned. Writing this on my "mid-2012" MacBook Pro, if when I bought it in 2013 I had wished to upgrade via Apple to the current 16Gb memory, I would not have been able to do so, and even now would be unable to do so, as Apple did not (and even now do not) consider 8GB memory modules to be a possibility for this machine. Yet, under Yosemite, I find that I do actually need more than 8Gb for some things.

Macworld UK said: Comments,Macworld UK,Doh. We'll fix this, thanks.

penguin apple said: Comments,penguin apple,Handbrake encoding might show more performance on the previous quad core Mac Mini 2012. Haswell can do some fast encoding of video if you use video codecs from Intel, but other than that you might want to look into an Apple Store that has the 2012 model in stock.Not sure though. I have no benchmark figures to compare with.

Djh145 said: Comments,Djh145,Yes. The 5400rpm 500GB, 1TB and 2TB HDD is in the Upper bay with the lower bay taken up by the 128GB PCIe SSD sat on top of a plastic hard drive carrier. The Mac Mini does not have a 2TB HDD or fusion as an upgrade option yet but it will be available at some point as well as a 32GB ram version.

Sean said: Comments,Sean,You could run WoW on the new Mac Mini. I'd recommend the mid-range model given the specs. The graphics on these is plenty for a game like that.As a rule, it's best to avoid low-end models and aim for the middle. 4GB is already pushing it today; 8GB should be the minimum for any new purchase. If you're not planning to do any heavy-duty work with it, that should be enough for the next few years.(HD video was the last technology to really push up memory and storage requirements, but I don't think anyone will be editing 4K video on a Mac mini.)

Tim said: Comments,Tim,Article sub-heading says iMac.

HollytRussell said: Comments,HollytRussell,Start ea­rni­ng ex­tra in­co­me wi­th online work from home... Make extra $3000 every month by working for a few hours a day. You'll need an internet connection and USA,CANADA,UK,AUSTRALIA or NEW ZEALAND residency and you are ready to start... You'll get paid weekly... &gt;&gt; -&gt; CLICK HERE for more informations &lt;-

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Grizzly Media said: Comments,Grizzly Media,Would have eaten into iMac sales though.. but yes agreed. would have been a great Mac!!

Grizzly Media said: Comments,Grizzly Media,No to both... CPU performance depends on how the app is written, but nearly all heavy duty apps are multicore/multi threaded aware and the quad core i7 will slay any of these..

Grizzly Media said: Comments,Grizzly Media,Try to find a 2012 quad core.. a much better machine for VM's plus you can chuck standard ram chips in it....

Anthony Maxwell said: Comments,Anthony Maxwell,I've been considering getting a Mac Mini and have been waiting for a model refresh. As someone who hasn't had a Mac since the PowerMac G5, I need some advice - the only game I play is World of Warcraft. I'm not fussed about playing on super ultra settings and I am on a budget. Will the mid-mini (2.6/iris) play WoW okay? Any advice will be appreciated. thanks

Steve Millar said: Comments,Steve Millar,OK, I'm obviously a bit of a numptie. I presumed all Core i7s were quad core, guess I should have examined the specs better.Question for all you gurus out there, I already have a Mac Mini 2009 (Core2Duo) which I've just installed vmWare Fusion on (to run Windows), it runs, but performance ain't great. I don't run games or any graphic intensive apps, but I'd like something with a bit more "grunt", is it better going for the new Mac Mini, or try and get a 2012 running a quad core i7?Thanks

Ernst Graeber said: Comments,Ernst Graeber,Hi, I would like to bay a Mac Mini with Intel i7 and 32 GB memory but I wonder if Intel Iris is good enough for Blander 3D rendering? I need a computer ASAP, please help me! :)

andrek said: Comments,andrek,so sad. no i7 quad core option is really a show stopper for me. they had it for the previous generation, why not now? who would want to "upgrade" from a quad core to a dual core? this is silly.

nsfw said: Comments,nsfw,Will be interesting to see if:- RAM and Drive are still user upgradable. (Many of us built our own Fusion drives)- The i7 dual core in here can outperform the i7 quad core from 2012?If the answer is no to both, then I'll be grabbing a 2012 Mac Mini server on the clearance shelf.

Yapster said: Comments,Yapster,Finally the Mac Mini is here and it will soon replace my MBP 2007(!). The question for you benchmark geek heads (and I mean that in the nicest way) is whether the CPU BTO option was worth it - ie replacing the 2.8ghz 4308U i5 with the 3ghz 4578U i7? Off the shelf one can get discounts from other retailers but BTO I'm beholden to Apple Store.To give my usage example, I do a lot of intensive tasks like lightroom work and handbrake encoding.

bazza said: Comments,bazza,should put in a blue ray drive :)

bazza said: Comments,bazza,I have the current mac mini, and its a great machine. its really fast, it converts Rips a dvd movie 1:1 in less than 20mins, and Handbrake takes just 8 minutes to convert to a quality MP4 file. Its also small, it seems faster in windows (bootcamp) than my dell workstation 6700 work laptop despite not being as powerful on paper. I love it. And, when it retires from active duty will make an excellent TV media station. I bought this because they did make a 17" laptop anymore - which i waited months on them to update.